[Gllug] Advansys SCSI Host Adapter

[Russell Howe]

On Mon, Dec 05, 2005 at 07:26:11AM -0500, Andrew Farnsworth wrote:
> This was helpful.  I mainly new most of it, but had not visited the subject in a long while.  It seems to me that for many users USB is fine but for the professional who spends much of their time scanning SCSI is better.  I recall that under SCSI it used to take a significant amount of time to get the scanner scanning while under USB it seems to start fairly quickly.  Note that I am comparing my SCSI scanner experience of 10 years ago with my USB scanner experience from last year.  I presume they have managed to improve the time it takes to start scanning under SCSI.

Also a point in favour of USB is that it is inherently hotpluggable.

SCSI is hotpluggable in some circumstances, but I don't think you'll
find SCSI scanners tend to be.

So, for a casual user, the ability to pull the scanner out of a drawer
(some scanners are very thin these days, and have dimensions not far off
A4), plug it in, do a scan or two and put it away would be a bit of a
win over a SCSI scanner which would require powering off the machine to
move (which would effectively mean that it either never gets moved, or
rarely gets connected :)

USB2 would address the performance issue I think (theoretical 480Mbit/s
or is it Mbytes/s? or thereabouts?), although like Tet said, most
(all?) USB controllers seem to really bog down the system when trying
to do high performance stuff.

Presumably there are firewire scanners out there? The impression I got
was that firewire controllers were generally more efficient and less of
a drain on the host computer's resources (lower interrupt load/better
use of DMA/bus mastering, perhaps?).

SCSI should also be a fair bit more polished where support is concerned
- drivers are mature, firmware certainly should be by now.

-- 
Russell Howe       | Why be just another cog in the machine,
rhowe at siksai.co.uk | when you can be the spanner in the works?
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